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Group Asks Gov't to Crack Down on Product Placement
Buck Mulligan writes "The rise of commercial-skipping Tivo has resulted in greater reliance on "product placement," and Commercial Alert has filed a petition (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to crack down on the practice. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert writes: "The interweaving of advertising and programming has become so routine that television networks now are selling to advertisers a measure of control over aspects of their programming. Some programs are so packed with product placements that they are approaching the appearance of infomercials. The head of a company that obtained repeated product placements actually called one such program 'a great infomercial.' Yet these programs typically lack the disclosure required of infomercials to uphold honesty and fair dealing.""
Kill their ratings and it will stop. Simple. Besides, it has Paul Anka's guarantee.
When all else fails, run.
I heard howard interview a b-movie actress who said that she gets paid by advertisers to drop a product name on interview shows (eg: The tonight show).
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
This is really a side issue, but the distributors are getting power over the content based on product ads as well.
For example, assume Miramax signs a deal with Coors such that all characters in a film are shown drinking Coors in the US version of the film, but signs a different deal for the Asian distribution so that the characters are shown drinking Kirin. They simply digitally edit the masters for each region.
While that example was fictional, there have been independant films that have been modified by the distributor because the filmmaker use the "wrong" product when making the movie.
I don't know about television, but there is little question that the only possible response to movie piracy is product placement. With product placement, you might even encourage people to pirate movies.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I was watching ER, and they had three of their products in promenetly displayed near some binders at the check-in nursing station thing. Why would a nurses station need to have software such as ArcServIT, BrightStor, UniCenter, etc.. all nicely lined up next to the monitor of their PC? It's just so odd, and does not fit in with the audience at all. These are Enterprise software suites that cost thousands of dollars.
Additionally, I saw the very same CA lineup in "Just Shoot Me", behind the CEO's desk, next to pictures of his family, and stuff. It would make so much more sense if the product placements were appropriate to the audience.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
TiVo doesn't "skip commercials" any more than a VCR does. Either one requires the viewer to fast-play while watching the screen and then press a button when it reaches the part of the recording you want to watch. TiVo performs the job less clunkily than a VCR (the advantage of disk storage over tape), but that's it. (I believe ReplayTV is the one that actually has a commercial-skipping feature.)
Why should the government impose any limits at all on advertising? If enough people die from taking drugs for a condition where the drug hurts rather than helps, people will stop buying that drug, right?
Government intervention may be appropriate here because product placement is a form of commercial speech, and courts have recognized that the government has legitimate interest in limiting some forms of commercial speech. The steps you hypothesize for the market to limit the product are naive: How many old TV shows or movies stopped using cigarettes because they caused lung cancer?
I seriously doubt Tivos with their puny penetration have anything to do with it. They should blame it on something called the remote control. That and increasing competition for advertising giving greater power to those that hold the money.
I honestly have not seen really obnoxious examples of product placement but then I don't watch much network tv.
...why are we blaming TiVo for increasing product placement? Seems to me you could just as easily blame the Internet (before I got a TiVo, I would web-surf during the ads) or the remote control (before that, I channel-surfed).
Or, more pointedly, you could blame the networks. Same people who bring you corner logos (now opaque, full-color, moving pictures, on all the time) and promos during the end credits (no longer content to talk over them, now they squish them off to an unreadable size and speed and insert a 75%-screen-coverage full-video promo spot) and even during the show (superimposed crawls, anyone?).
They can all lick my center of gravity.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Newspapers and magazines can do essentially anything they want, in the US. Broadcast bandwidth is a scarce resource, though, and needs to be regulated or it would be worthless. For that reason, broadcast rights are strictly limited by the FCC, and there are regulations that limit how people with broadcast rights can act, including how much commercial content they can run.
I'm not especially worked up about product placement (the WB keeps driving up the resale value of my TiBook, and now Rory Gilmore is increasing the prestige of my Yale degree, as well!) but given that I'd go to jail if I opened by own TV station, I see the reason to tell ABC and CBS what they can do with theirs.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
OK, I understand you don't like government regulation. But since we HAVE regulation over commercials the petition is saying there shouldn't be an end run via product placement. If you're not going to eliminate the regulation of commercials then apply the rules across the board. The petition isn't saying to get rid of product placement, it's only saying the standards should apply to both.
i.e. everyone gets treated the same. No counting a commercial from Broward county without counting a product placement from Franklin
It isn't really about restricting advertising in TV shows, it's about the truth of those advertisements. There are restrictions on what you can say in a normal ad (you can't create an ad that says smoking cigarettes will cure lung cancer). The issue is whether the cigarette company could instead pay a tv show to do it for them.
Funny how we keep importing concepts that first get produced in the UK such as Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The Weakest Link, Coupling, Trading Spaces (Changing Rooms)...
Yeah, the govment is just a mess and we don't want the govment messing wit our bizness.
I am very happy that the Government has:
Passed a pure food and drug act so I don't have to eat food that has been treated / raised/ slaughtered in an unhealthy manner.
Set standards for roads and cars and aircraft.
Agreed upon standards for the use of the RF spectrum.
Review and approve medicines.
but. . . we don't need no stinking govment
Quite frankly, I'm tired of the marketers and I'm certain that the writers, producers, directors, and actors are getting pretty fed up with "product placement".
As I write this on a 12" powerbook, I note for the record that I see way too many Apple's on Fox's "24"
I'd like an abacus or almost anything else that advances the story rather than catches the eye.
Or, if you don't like the product placements, complain about them when the sales rep comes calling. I can think of several companies that I will not do business with because of their advertising practices.
Characters in TV shows and movies have to use various items as props. Sometimes these are chosen with business motivations in mind. As a viewer, I'm okay with this, as long as it does not detract from the show.
For instance, Halle Berry has a Ford Thunderbird in the latest 007 film. That's fine. But if Bond had borrowed it for a gratuitous car chase, all the while commenting on its superb handling and acceleration, that would certainly have ruined the movie. Stick a product in in a context where one might realistically encounter it. Don't comment on it, extol its virtues, or zoom in for a close up of it.
Trying too hard to avoid product placement can be just as distracting. A can labelled "COLA" and with a not-quite-Coke design looks fake. Pixellating out the names of products and stores as if they were nudity is annoying.
Basically, I don't care whether the hero reaches for a Dasani or an Aquafina as long as it's unobtrusive, realistic for the character, non-distracting, and so on. If the audience consciously notices the item as being plugged, the advertising was too conspicuous.
hmm...
I agree and I don't. First of all I do not watch TV of ANY sort with regards to cable, free or whatever... I do rent DVDs from netflix.
I listen (selectively) to the radio on my daily commute to and from SF from san jose for work.
I call *ALL* advertising Thought Pollution. I cannot tell you of any media aside from maybe whitepapers and some books that are not assaulting my consciousness with adverts. I really want to stop the proliferation of ads.
on the one hand you can make the naive statement to simply "dont look" or "turn of the tube" - but the fact of the matter is that advertising is DESIGNED around this... they force the ads into areas where you cannot escape them.
The are the absolute trash of the landscape - both the physical and mental.
I think that there truly should be a method to opt out of all advertising schemes. - Maybe at least they should pay me.
I suppose it depends on the market. Americans have become accustomed to sports that stop every few seconds, Europeans are used to more continuously flowing sports. On-screen advertising during soccer, rugby, ozzie-rules, gaelic football or hurling is, IMHO, a good way to bring revenue in whilst not interfering too much with the game.
If I didn't know better I'd think that the rules of American football evolved with TV advertising and product placement in mind. If that were true, it would be a good example of commercial advertising interests having a detrimental effect on content.
I think there's got to be a happy medium here.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The same is true of virtually any publication that does reviews. The publication might not be paid for the reviews, but they do get benefits from simply having the reviews (especially if it's something hotly anticipated).
Note the correlation between ad pages bought over the previous 12 months and the reviews the car mags give. I guarantee that a lot of the vitriol directed at BMW for making the 5-series look like a Pontiac Grand Prix (especially now that the Grand Prix has lost a lot of the idiotic cladding) is because BMW scaled back their print ad budget last year.
And before someone mentions Consumer Reports, they're even more subtly biased (specifically against Saturn). CR gets a lot of their profit from sale of haggling guides. Saturn has long trumpeted their no-haggle policies. If Saturn sells vehicles, other manufacturers might follow suit with similar sales approaches. If enough manufacturers go to no-haggle, there goes CR's haggling guides and the sales they represent.
Drugs can be a product placement. Further, they can do so without all of the requirements placed on conventional drug advertising (disclosure of side effects, contraindications, etc.)
If someone is watching ER, Noah Wylie's scriptwriters can choose whether or not he sends a patient home with instructions to take 'ibuprofen' (generic) or 'Advil' (brand name). I'd probably shrug this one off, since it's over-the-counter stuff--but has anyone else noticed the amount of prescription drug advertising in the United States? I can see quite a market for product placements in television shows where all the disclosures aren't required.
Such advertising might be even more popular in some other countries (I know this is outside the FTC's purview) where drug advertising is more restricted. (Canada, for instance, permits advertisers to show either the drug name or the symptoms it treats--but not both. You can build awareness of your brand name, or awareness of a disease, but you can't get both.)
~Idarubicin